What is it with Mac users and their tendency to think that everything was invented on the Mac? I've been seeing this a lot over the past few weeks as features of Longhorn have gotten leaked out. Compositing? MacOS X. XAML? There's an equivalent on Mac too. Name something on Windows and you're told it showed up on the Mac.

Which is a pretty tall attitude for people who only recently seemed to have discovered preemptive multitasking or threads. Did Apple "rip off" the idea of preemptive multitasking from Microsoft? Or IBM who had it on OS/2 back in OS/2 1.0 on the PC in the late 80s? 

In reality, many, if not most features in an OS are derivative of something that came before. Stardock takes a regular beating from Mac users who are certain that everything in it was ripped off from the Mac.  In some cases features were inspired by some feature in the Mac. But in most cases, it's an obvious idea that we actually did first.

Alpha blended shadows behind your windows? We actually did that first with WindowFX. But did we "invent"? this idea? No. My Amiga back in 1984 had solid shadows behind them. Often times, the hardware dictates what's possible. We were able to do WindowFX because the hardware finally made it possible to do alpha blending at a reasonable speed.

How about the much talked about zooming icons on the MacOS X "dock"?  Turns out, that showed up in DesktopX first. But odds are, someone else had thought of the idea of having icons grow on mouse over before us too. It's an obvious idea that many people can independently come up with.

Last week I pulled out more hair as a popular TV show made a claim that there is no PC equivalent of Konfabulator. This is despite the fact that DesktopX preceded it by YEARS and has an immense user base. Each week it is one of the top 100 most popular programs in terms of downloads. Last week it was the #1 desktop enhancement on Download.com with over 20,000 downloads in a single week and received a 4 star review. Admittedly, we haven't pushed DesktopX as hard as say WindowBlinds because we have to focus on what generates revenue. No doubt though that you'll find someone claiming that DesktopX "ripped off" Konfabulator.

That doesn't excuse those who blatantly steal from others. For example, we could, with relatively little effort, run Konfabulator widgets as DesktopX objects. But we don't. Why? Because that would be incredibly unethical. But make no mistake, there are plenty of software developers who would make no bones about doing that kind of thing and that's the kind of thing that Mac users complain about -- with good reason.

There is a lot of innovation going on in the industry. Apple is an innovator. There is no doubt about that. But its innovations tend to be about taking an existing idea and taking it to the next level. Whether that be the mouse, the GUI, MP3 players, or more recently on-line music purchasing.  And Mac software developers tend to be like that too. The average Konfabulator "Widget" is far superior in polish than the typical DesktopX object for example. But there are also 5X as many DesktopX objects (not even counting the themes) as there are Konfabulator widgets. Which is kind of the whole PC vs. Mac story. There's a lot more "Crap" on the PC than on the Mac. But that doesn't mean that all PC stuff is crap or that the good PC stuff is just stolen from the Mac.

http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/film/resolutions.html

Some interesting alternative endings for The Matrix: Revolutions.

On Bi-polar stuff The trick to dealing with bi-polar, at least mild bi-polar tendencies is for those 3 days of manic behavior where the ideas are flowing: Write them down. Then use the other 20 days of normal level to execute on them.

If you have Object Desktop you can download tonight's new build of IconDeveloper.

IconDeveloper is a program that makes it incredibly easy to create Windows icons.

Tonight's build let's you literally right click on a .PNG file (like all those PNGs in the ObjectDock section on the left) and choose to turn them directly into Windows icons (with full Windows XP support).

If you don't have Object Desktop you can purchase it at: https://www.stardock.com/order.asp

See the screenshot attached to see what we mean.

If you've been coming to JoeUser for long, you've hopefully seen a gradual progression in the quality and features of the site. We've been heavily evaluating the various blog features and technologies out there. Some are really good. But some are just dumb. Here are some of my newbie view points on these issues. Feel free to comment and tell me where you agree or disagree.

Good Blog Technologies

RSS

The Good:
RSS is a standard that takes headlines from news sites (particularly blog sites) and puts them into a standard XML format that can be then read. This allows for readers and syndication sites to make it easier for news junkies to get to information faster.

The Bad:
It's relatively feature poor. There is no straight forward standard for publishing. Some have said that RSS will eventually replace Usenet. That ain't going to happen until comments are handled more seamlessly.

JoeUser's Use:
So we have made JoeUser.com very RSS friendly. Every blogger's site here now has their own RSS feed that can be seamlessly syndicated. We embed tags into the actual HTML so that sites can discover JoeUser's RSS feed too along with a button that explicitly links to it. Our XML also has special RSS versions of our articles.

Here is a normal web zoom in of an article:
https://www.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=768

Here is the RSS zoom in of same article:
https://www.joeuser.com/articles.asp?AID=768

The RSS one is quicker and cleaner so that RSS readers can zip through your blogs much faster making what you write more easy to read.

Referrals

This is a tech more sites need to make use of. I'm amazed at how many sites will be full of complicated, barely used blogging technologies while totally blowing off auto-referbacks.

JoeUser supports Referbacks. If you have a blog here, go back and look at one of your earlier blogs. You'll probably find that someone has linked to it.  I have an article that has over 100 referrals just from Google.

Referrals are important. If you want people to link to your article, one way to encourage that is to have the article automatically link back. If you, from another website, link to this article, within seconds of someone coming to this article from where you posted a referral will appear here and show the user how to get back there.

Audience Control

This is another feature that most blogs I've checked out don't have. Here on JoeUser as well as some other sites I've been to I can control who sees a blog. I've made blogs that only I can read. Things I'm working on but don't want the public to see. I can even make custom audiences. So if I wanted, I could have just my wife and my friends be able to read a given blog.  In the coming weeks, we plan to upgrade the blog group feature to let people write directly to the blog group and have only those who are members of it be able to see it. Then I could have a family blog group where I post blogs that only my family can see and as new people in my family join the blog group they can see my posts to them.

But enough on the good stuff. Let's talk about some of the dumber techs. Then you can comment back and tell me why I'm wrong.

The Dumb Blog Techs

Trackback

Sorry, I find this "Feature" to just be dumb. First off, it takes too much work. Trackback is supposed to be a way for related articles to show up. Basically, articles that refer to a given blog entry will show up in track back if the proper coding has been done. I guess.  To me, this just strikes me as the poor man's version of referrals. Why do track back when referrals work so much better. No fuss with referrals. They just work.

Here's an article I wrote about keeping Windows XP stable. At the bottom is lists 110 referrals. Ever seen a trackback with more than a handful of trackbacks? So now you click on the referral list.  It is sorted by # of referrals and is smart to put domains together (so all Google referrals show up as a single group).  Now, admittedly you end up with a lot of junk referrals in there because of people passing the link to friends via web based emails. But because it's sorted, you can quickly see any major articles that refer to your article. For example, I found that a few dozen people came from a site called AtomicPC. Here is the article that referenced mine. Did they have to put in special code to do that? No. Just just linked to my article.

This brings me to another thing:

Blog Rolling

I like blog rolling -- to a point. But many blog sites have a gazillion links on there. I tend to agree with my friend Steven Den Beste who has made it a point to limit who he links to. My personal page has a blog roll on it to a few friends on it.  Unfortunately, blog rolling has become the poor-man's equivalent of link exchanges.

Go to http://karmagirl.joeuser.com/ and look at her top referrals (bottom right). On JoeUser, link exchanges have merit automatically attached. Anyone outside of JoeUser who links to karmagirl.joeuser.com is certainly going to instantly show up on that top 10 referrals page. To me, that is what link exchanging is about. A reasonable exchange of referrals. Blog rolling should be about picking a handful of sites that you want to highlight. Just personal taste there I guess.

Link Cosmos

This appears to be another technology for encouraging people to link to your articles. I still prefer referrals. Much more straight forward, no having to go to an external site and it's merit based. The other thing that these techs have in common is that because there's a barrier to entry, they don't get used as much. As a blogger, I am partially motivated by the thought of people reading what I write. I write for my own personal reasons but I also hope that people enjoy what I write. Having lots of statistics that show 0 doesn't help that.  But with referrals, the threshold is so low that almost anyone will get some eventually.

The bigger picture

I could be wrong on all this mind you. Or more to the point, my opinion may be at odds with the general consensus of bloggers. But I tend to look at successful blogging like this: People who write blogs like to link to others. And I think they liked to be linked to back.  One of my motivations for opening up JoeUser to others is that as a "little guy" I felt discouraged seeing a handful of sites (Which don't have linkback features strangely) getting nearly all the traffic with lots of little guys linking to what they write. If I link to something, it's nice to be able to see how many people I sent over there as well as have a shot of maybe getting some people over there to come back to me. Merit based auto-link exchange. It encourages people to link more to other people and get something in return.

And anything that puts barriers into that is going to be problematic.

The Register has an article that outlines how Apple isn't netting any money from iTunes and the evils of copy protected music (DRM). Its suggestion is to put a tax on CDs or something to take care of piracy.

Check out this JoeUser article for a counter view. What are your views?

What do you get when you combine Samurai Jack with Star Wars? The Clone Wars Micro-Series.  These short (very short) episodes run only a few minutes each and are done on the cheap but are incredibly enjoyable. I wish they'd done this between Ep 1 and Ep 2.

It's the overall story of the Star Wars universe that excites many fans. And as bad as Ep 1 and Ep 2 were, the problem wasn't so much the story but..ahem..the director.  Ep 1 may not have been the greatest story but you take our Jar Jar and improve the acting and it's a pretty solid experience.  Ep 2 even more so.  Read the graphic novel edition of Ep 2 and you quickly realize just how much damage Lucas is doing to his own creation through his inept directing and allowing poor acting make it through.

Here, in this micro series, we have a proven master at animation (the man behind Samurai Jack) working with arguably the best fantasy universe out there outside Middle Earth.

Two thumbs up so far. Can't wait to see what happens next.

As I sit here in my comfy couch with my "The Register" white polo shirt on today I read Andrew Orlowski's article about Apple and iTunes.

And I basically disagree with almost everything in it. Which isn't surprising, I usually disagree on such matters mainly because I'm a greedy bastard capitalist while he's more in touch with feelings of an almost human nature.

His article basically makes three points:

1. Apple's iTunes isn't netting Apple any money. It's a loss leader used to help sell iPods.
2. Most of the money goes to the RIAA who we all agree are a bunch of total bastards.
3. Apple is, in essence, helping those total bastards when in reality the best solution would be to have some sort of "tax" (be it on CDs or income tax or something) that would then go to the artists.

It is point #3 I have a problem with. How is forcing everyone out there to pay the music industry a good thing? Who decides which artists should get paid and how much?

Paying taxes on roads we don't use may bug some people but there's a natural limit on the number of roads and that limit shows up pretty quickly. But on music? Half the guys in my high school class were hoping to "make it big" in the music biz. Taxes being used on health care or roads (or any forced fee) is more tolerable than being used on music. Music is a luxury. They have no practical value.

And the music industry isn't the only ones experiencing mass piracy. I don't know if anyone's noticed but software developers have been dealing with piracy on a mass scale for decades. You don't see us suggesting that tax dollars go to pay us for our efforts making video games and computer software.  Who do you think loses more to piracy each year? The "artists" at Metallica or the "artists" at Microsoft? Should we start sending checks to Microsoft?

Once you start creating slush funds for musicians to pay for some unspecified amount of electronic piracy you're opening Pandora's box.

I don't see the problem with Digital Rights Management. Sure, right now it's a pain because so many players don't yet support it. But in a year, it's going to get increasingly seamless. I've already bought $30+ in songs electronically which is $30 more than I spent in the past year before at the store.

I much prefer systems in which users pay the cost when possible. I'd happily pay for roads directly if there was a seamless way to pay my share every time I used it. Right now, toll booths are still quite cumbersome for most people (but getting better). Electronic music purchasing, by contrast, is quite seamless and getting more seamless all the time.

Want to change your boot screen without patching your actual OS kernel?

Stardock has a free program in development to do just that and the first alpha is now available:

http://scripting.stardock.com/private/bs_current.exe

BootSkin replaces the boot screen by creating a device driver that does the job. This has several advantages:

1) It will work on Windows 2000, it'll work on Windows XP, and it'll work on Longhorn 4051 it seems to work. Heck, it probably works on NT 4.

2) This has been implemented in the way that Microsoft would probably do it (or arguably how they should have done it). No patching, no hacking, totally safe.

3) No need to "back up" your kernel. If you somehow blow up your system, you can just boot up in safe mode and uninstall it.

Limitations:

Right now it's no better no worse than the regular boot screen. That means 16 color VGA (640x480).

What's next:

High resolution, true color and animation.  But these won't be for a bit. We want to make sure this works well on everyone's system. Creating your own boot screens is incredibly easy. Just look at the included ones in the directory it's installed to (\program files\stardock\wincustomize\bootskin) and go from there. You don't even have to do progress bars if you don't want to. We'll have a bunch of examples as soon as we put some other projects together but hopefully you'll be able to figure out how to do these on your own. Remember though - 16 color (that's 4 bit) only right now since it's VGA. Same as regularly boot screens.

But this is just to get things started and make sure there aren't any problems.  It's been tested extensively internally but usual caveat: This is an alpha, use at your own risk, assume it will blow up your computer, kill your pets, set the house on fire, etc. No problems reported so far.

Boy was Matrix Revolutions great!

I mean, that scene with Agent Smith as a human making his way to the Zion main frame. It really pulled it together in seeing why he wanted into that mainframe and how it was his ticket out of there.

That big battle between Neo and the ghost twins. Now THAT is why he's "The one".  Once you free your mind there's nothing you can't do. Seeing them phasing into other dimensions in their battle was just incredible and I loved the way the world shimmered as Neo and the ghosts phased in and out of each other's dimensions.

The Trainman neo battle was a great fast paced way to get the movie off with a bang. Seeing two "gods" battling it out was a good warm up that would only be surpassed by the final battle between Smith and Neo.  Plus it led to the immediate confrontation with the Merovingian which really gave us a cool glimpse about how the Matrix is just a piece of the overall machine world.

I really liked the way they resolved the whole issue of how if Neo didn't return to the source that the Matrix would suffer a catastrophic failure leading to the death of every human being connected to it.

It was also very cool on how the red/blue pill metaphor became a metaphor for all of mankind as machines and humans recognized the symbiosis alluded to by the councilman in Reloaded.  Seeing the humans and machines recognizing that they could live together and rebuild the earth together was breath taking.

Which reminds me, who else thought it was cool in how they resolved the whole destroyed earth, what are they going to do with the population connected issue? I thought it was very clever that Zion and the machines collaborated on a way of slowly having the Matrix world become like the destroyed world and having humans controlling machines from inside the Matrix to fix the world so that both could live in harmony.

I also liked how they explained the machine need for humans when one might wrongfully get the thought that maybe the machines might simply just put up zeppelins covered in solar panels attached to the power grid via wires to get sunlight since the cloud layer over the earth wasn't too far up.  Not to mention that one might easily harness all that electricity in the clouds by putting a metal rod up there. It was good that they spent a minute explaining that.

The greatly expanded roll of Persephone was nice. I thought it would have been too predictable for the Oracle to be the "mother" of the Matrix given the things the architect said in the second.  Persephone's roll was enlightening and yet helped make sense of the whole sentient machine thing that had been alluded to from the beginning.

Morpheus has an ass kicker was really good to see. When he and Neo were separated, it was pretty easy to see why he was considered "by most authorities to be the most dangerous man  in the world". 

I liked the way that Zion was able to make use of the Matrix-like features by remote controlling those huge mech things. The virtual use of those hardened EMP emitting mechs made it clear that the humans were going to be a tough thing. The introduction of machines hardened against EMP pulses only made sense and I'm glad that they did that since everyone knows that even low end miliary hardware is hardened against EMPs today.

It was interesting and yet understandable why Neo was able to control and do things to the machines outside the Matrix.

And most of all, I really liked the ending. It neatly wrapped things up while at the same time giving us an incredible plot twist that I would never in a million years imagined. Great stuff!

What am I talking about?

"Oh, when I get bored I make up my own movie..."

Want to change your boot screen without patching your actual OS kernel?

Stardock has a free program in development to do just that and the first alpha is now available:

http://scripting.stardock.com/private/bs_current.exe

BootSkin replaces the boot screen by creating a device driver that does the job. This has several advantages:

1) It will work on Windows 2000, it'll work on Windows XP, and it'll work on Longhorn 4051 it seems to work. Heck, it probably works on NT 4.

2) This has been implemented in the way that Microsoft would probably do it (or arguably how they should have done it). No patching, no hacking, totally safe.

3) No need to "back up" your kernel. If you somehow blow up your system, you can just boot up in safe mode and uninstall it.

Limitations:

Right now it's no better no worse than the regular boot screen. That means 16 color VGA (640x480).

What's next:

High resolution, true color and animation.  But this is just to get things started and make sure there aren't any problems.  It's been tested extensively internally but usual caveat: This is an alpha, use at your own risk, assume it will blow up your computer, kill your pets, set the house on fire, etc.